“You sent them to that ship. I just checked the colony log. Directive dated 6/12/79, signed Burke, Carter J. You sent them out there and you didn’t even warn them. Why didn’t you warn them?”
Unless you had read Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of Aliens, the specific details of how the colonists of Hadley’s Hope had discovered the Derelict were unknown to Alien fans in 1986. All the theatrical release of Aliens had revealed was that Carter Burke had sent the colonists to investigate Ellen Ripley’s claims of the derelict extra-terrestrial vessel and its vicious cargo.
That it was Newt’s parents who had brought back the parasitic lifeform to Hadley’s Hope would become more widely known following the release of the Special Edition on LaserDisc in 1991. But it would take the publishing of Alien: River of Pain in 2014 for what exactly happened to Newt’s parents in the Derelict, the very beginning of the fall of Hadley’s Hope, to be explored.
However, this wasn’t always going to be the case. There was a time in Aliens’ development where we’d have explored more of the Derelict before the Xenomorphs would have infested Hadley’s Hope. While James Cameron was developing Aliens, his earliest intent was that the colonists’ presence in the Derelict was more substantial. In Cameron’s treatment, completed September 21st 1983, the lead-up to Russ Jorden’s infection was largely the same. Newt and Timmy watched from the tractor as their mother and father headed into the unknown depths of the Derelict.
The divergence comes when a terrified Newt screams as Anne Jorden throws open the tractor door, having returned alone. Russ Jorden had been left within the strange extra-terrestrial craft that loomed above them. As she did in the finished film, Anne grabbed the radio and called for help from Hadley’s Hope…”Mayday!! Mayday!!”
Instead of immediately cutting away to Gateway Station, Cameron’s original intention was to witness more colonists enter the Derelict to retrieve Russ Jorden, but would instead increase the size of the nascent Alien infestation on LV-426 – which was simply named Acheron in the treatment, and would later be known as LV-420 in the incomplete first draft that followed before being renamed LV-426 in the completed first draft.
Following Anne Jorden’s mayday call, the treatment returned to the site of the damaged Derelict, where we now find it a hive of activity as colonists organize a rescue party to retrieve the unresponsive Russ Jorden. Inside the wreckage, the would-be-rescuers are led to the Pilot’s Chamber, where they find the fossilized Space Jockey covered in volcanic ash from the unstable volcanic activity that James Cameron intended to be the reason for the Derelict’s further damaged state, and why the warning beacon that the Nostromo had picked up 57 years earlier was no longer transmitting.
Anne led the rescuers to a “slanting rib into a vast dark chamber,” explaining that while the pair had split up to search more of the ship, Russ had slipped and fallen into the chamber below where they lost radio contact.
Perhaps this “slanting rib” was intended to be the same shaft that Thomas Kane had previously used to access the cargo chamber, or it might have been a new route opened by the damage to the Derelict? It’s not clarified in the treatment.
The colonists rappelled down into the vast chamber below, where they found the mysterious blue laser active and continuing to cover the thousands of eggs still contained within the cavernous chamber.
“Don’t touch anything” instructed the rescuers’ leader, and it’s while the colonists spread out to find Russ Jorden’s motionless body amongst the leathery objects that they start to notice the eggs begin to open.
It’s not currently known if this scene survived into those 90 pages of the incomplete first draft that James Cameron wrote prior to exiting Aliens to film The Terminator, but when Cameron returned to the project and revised his earlier work and handed in his first complete draft of Aliens on February 26th 1985, Russ Jordan’s rescue was removed from the script and any depiction of the couple’s exploration of the Derelict would remain unseen for 26 years.
While it would have undeniably been an exciting and visually impressive scene, and another clear indication of the plurality of the sequel, James Cameron would later explain the cost of recreating the interior of the Derelict for an event that could clearly be inferred ultimately wasn’t worth the cost.
“One of my first ideas was to do a scene inside the derelict where they actually find the egg chamber and all the eggs come to life. But it would have cost us a million dollars just to create the same basic imagery we’d already been shown in Alien, so I decided to treat the whole aspect as inferred. We know what’s inside the ship; we don’t need to see it again.”
And though we wouldn’t get to see more of the actual fall and infestation of Hadley’s Hope on the big screen, the wider event was later revisited by Dark Horse Comics and Mike Richardson in June and July of 1992 when the two issue comic series Aliens: Newt’s Tale was published. But we still didn’t see what happened to Newt’s parents inside the Derelict as the series was told from Newt’s point of view.
Fast-forwarding to 2014, when Titan Books released the third of what would become twenty original Alien novels, and the final entry in the trilogy of novels that was later retitled the Shadow Archive, Christopher Golden would finally explore what happened to Anne and Russ Jorden inside the enigmatic Derelict ship in Alien: River of Pain.
According to River of Pain, the Jorden family left Hadley’s Hope, following the co-ordinates provided to them by the administration of the colony, on the morning of June 20th 2179. They arrived at the Derelict around 11am the following day, on June 21st. Entering the rent in the collapsed prong of the Derelict, Anne and Russ Jorden began to explore the interior of the find of their lifetime, the one that would let them leave LV-426 and set them up for life.
Determined to have a better understanding of their find, and document the interior before the ship was officially reported to Weyland-Yutani, the prospectors headed into the wreckage. Surmising that the cockpit or the engine room of the extra-terrestrial vessel would be at the crux of the ship, they headed deeper inside the mysterious and unsettling wreckage.
“Anne tried to keep her bearings, picturing the way the ship had sat on the ground, canted toward the back. It seemed hollow and dead, empty in a way that reminded her of an abandoned church she had entered once, as a girl. The small cemetery in the churchyard had been relocated, the bodies dug up and moved. The tabernacle had been taken out, along with several of the more elaborate stained-glass windows.
The place had felt haunted to her, not by ghosts, but by the absence of life… the architectural memory of voices raised in song and prayer, the echoes of footfalls on the stone floor, the clack of wooden kneelers, and the hope and surrender that always came with worship. She’d never again felt such emptiness, until now.”
As they continued to probe deeper into the Derelict, the Jordens discovered holes scorched into the strange organic-like hull, evidence of weapon-fire, as well as a strange spiral staircase that led further into the depths of the wreckage.
After approximately twenty minutes of exploration, they eventually entered a section of the crashed ship that looked vastly different to the rest of the vessel they’d explored so far. Unknown to the pair, they had discovered a Xenomorph hive within the wreckage.
“The walls were different here. If the ship’s construction seemed to hint at the organic, this was something else entirely. These walls were covered with a smooth, ribbed substance, black and gleaming like some mélange of insect cocoon and volcanic rock.”
Within the hive, they located another spiral staircase. Anne was compelled to venture down, wary of missing any valuable technology contained deeper in the ship. In the lower resin-covered levels of the Derelict, the Jordens discovered the remains of four Xenomorph XX121, including one that had literally been ripped in half – presumably by the Engineers – as well as what they hypothesised to be holding cells intended to transport the creatures.
“Anne held her breath as she stepped into the corridor, staring at the thing in the juddering beam. She was trembling. In life, the alien had been very tall and powerfully built, with an extended torso and a long head. It seemed humanoid only in the sense that it had two arms and two legs, but otherwise it was entirely other. Something about it suggested an insect, which gave her an unnerving connection to her thoughts about the hard substance that coated the walls. Yet this was no bug.”
The prospectors also discovered the remains of twenty massacred Engineers, correctly surmising them to be the builders of the Derelict. Their exploration of the wreckage had left them continually more unsettled, and fearing they had left their young children in the tractor for too long, the Jordens quickly recorded evidence of their grim discovery before returning to the higher level to continue their trek to the crux of the vessel.
Before making their way into the Pilot’s Chamber, the husband and wife found themselves face-to-face with an enormous grotesque tableau of death – the remains of a Xenomorph Queen and Engineer locked in combat when they perished.
“The alien she thought of as a queen had impaled the crewman with its tail, but the crewman had given as good as he’d gotten. He’d thrust his left arm up inside the queen’s jaws, as if he had tried to destroy its brain with a bare hand.”
Alien vs. Predator Galaxy once again turned to the amazingly talented Declan Loftus to visualise the scene in which the Jordens stumble upon the horrifically mesmerizing scene of the Engineer and Alien Queen locked together in death.
The inevitable was soon to happen to Russ Jorden as the would-be-treasure-hunters entered the vast Pilot’s Chamber. Inside, they discovered the remains of the Engineer pilot that the crew of the Nostromo had found so many years before.
It’s here that we get an out-of-universe consistency error between the novel and the film. River of Pain depicts the egg chamber as being in the Pilot’s Chamber. When Anne stumbled from the side of the Space Jockey, she nearly fell into the egg pit that the novel depicts surrounding the Space Jockey.
As Anne investigated the Xenomorph eggs, they began to stir – pulsing with activity as they sensed the new potential hosts among them. Anne reached towards the surface of one of the eggs, but she tripped and fell over, leaving Russ stood before the egg, where she could only watch as the sickly petals parted, “strings of mucous hanging from the four petal-like flaps” and the facehugger within launched itself at Russ Jorden.
The inconsistency with the Pilot’s Chamber and the egg chamber was fixed in the 2017 Audible adaptation of Alien: River of Pain that was written and directed by Dirk Maggs. In the Audible version, Anne stumbles from the Space Jockey chair and nearly falls down the shaft that Kane had used to enter the egg chamber below. Anne and Russ are able to make out the distant eggs below them and assume the cavernous area beneath to be the cargo hold, and head down.
While the question of how the Jordens gained access to the cargo hold isn’t relevant to Golden’s original novel, it is not addressed in the Audible version. They discover the shaft, and then are there. When we see the pair exit the crawler in the film, they do have backpacks, so it’s possible that they did pack equipment they could use as a winch, but it’s not specifically stated in the Audible despite both the novel and audio drama referencing equipment such as core samplers and short-range communications.
In Alien: Isolation, when the crew of the Anesidora rediscover the Derelict, they traverse the shaft using the winch set up by the Nostromo crew – this is another minor continuity error as the winch was actually disassembled to construct the stretcher that Dallas and Lambert use to carry Kane back to the ship, but it’s not something made obvious in the film itself.
Nearly 1 hour and 40 minutes after initially entering the house of horrors that was the crashed alien spacecraft, Anne Jorden dragged her husband back to the crawler and radioed Hadley’s Hope for help. Unwilling to expose her children to the unknown parasite – and certain Russ would agree – Anne wrapped her husband up as best she could and left him outside the crawler while they awaited the arrival of the small contingent of Colonial Marines stationed at the colony who quickly mobilized to retrieve the comatose colonist and his horrified family. Help arrived in the early hours of June 22nd.
After returning the Jorden family back to Hadley’s Hope and securing Russ Jorden’s comatose body in the Medical Lab around 9pm the same day, the Colonial Marine commander Captain Demian Brackett redeployed Sergeant Marvin Draper and two other marines to secure the Derelict, ordering them not to allow anyone else to enter the extra-terrestrial wreckage without authorisation. Both Newt’s Tale and River of Pain depict additional colonists being sent back to further investigate the crashed alien vessel, and then returning the following day with more facehugged victims.
Russ Jordan’s chestburster birth as depicted in Aliens: Newt’s Tale. Artwork by Jim Somerville, Brian Garvey & Gregory Wright.
It’s as the new victims are being brought into the lab that Russ Jorden contorts in agony, and the nascent chestburster births in a fountain of blood and gore, and disappears into the colony’s ventilation system. On June 23rd 2179, sometime between 4:37 and 5:00pm, the Xenomorph XX121 infestation of Hadley’s Hope began.
While the events of the infestation of Hadley’s Hope have only been depicted in the previously mentioned Aliens: Newt’s Tale and Alien: River of Pain, the ruinous remains of the colony have been revisited numerous times, including in Gearbox’s Aliens: Colonial Marines and Marvel Comics’ Aliens: Aftermath. This one-shot comic offered another possibility for what happened to Russ Jorden when he was returned to Hadley’s Hope with an unexpected alien visitor in tow.
Written by Benjamin Percy with artwork by Dave Wachter and colors by Christopher Sotomayor, Aliens: Aftermath was released in celebration of Aliens’ 35th anniversary in July 2021. Set in 2214, 35 years after the events of Aliens, Aftermath introduced us to Cutter Vasquez, yet another addition to the Vasquez family tree in the expanded universe, the nephew of Aliens’ Private Jenette Vasquez. The leader of a small economic and political dissident group known as Renegade XM, Vasquez had dedicated his life to causing financial injury to Weyland-Yutani, as well as discovering the truth about what had happened to his aunt.
The Extrasolar Colonization Administration, who had split from Weyland-Yutani and were looking to metaphorically bloody their nose, had made a deal with Cutter Vasquez. Unknown to the rest of Renegade XM, in exchange for providing the co-ordinates to LV-426 – which had been removed from all star charts following the events of Aliens – Cutter Vasquez would retrieve Subject Zero from the ruins of Hadley’s Hope and deliver him to the Extrasolar Colonization Administration. Though not named in the comic, Subject Zero is heavily implied to be Russ Jorden.
Subject Zero’s cryo-tube. Artwork by Dave Wachter and Christopher Sotomayor.
When Renegade XM arrived at LV-426, they found the moon a radioactive wasteland. With a temperature below -20 degrees celcius and radiation levels at 600msv per hour, the moon was in the midst of a nuclear winter following the explosion of the Atmosphere Processor. Led by a single-minded Cutter Vasquez, Renegade XM entered the remains of Hadley’s Hope where they discovered a failed transmission supposedly recorded by Carter J. Burke and sent to Weyland Yutani.
“In case of mission failure, Subject Zero can be found on sublevel F. Warning: All attempts to contain specimen have so far failed.”
On further investigation, Subject Zero was discovered to have been “the first known infection” amongst the colonists of Hadley’s Hope. Under instruction from Weyland-Yutani, he had been placed in cryogenic storage to “quarantine and preserve the threat” and he had remained safely in stasis in the hived-up ruins of the sublevels of Hadley’s Hope for 35 years.
Unknown to Renegade XM, a single radiation-mutated Xenomorph had also survived in the intervening years and had been slowly picking off the group. It was as Cutter Vasquez was attempting to recover Subject Zero’s cryotube that the Xenomorph attacked the remaining members of Renegade XM. Subject Zero’s cryotube was dropped during the attack, and was severely damaged, causing the stasis to be terminated.
Aliens: Aftermath ends with the surviving member of Renegade XM, Woody Ballesteros, investigating the condition of Subject Zero through the shattered lid of his cryo-tube, only for the nascent chestburster to finally emerge.
The arcade game Aliens: Extermination also featured the Colonial Marines returning to LV-426 to investigate the loss of the characters from the film, only to find Hadley’s Hope in one piece. Rebellion’s Aliens vs. Predator 1999/Classic/2000 would also revisit LV-426, where a new colony and research facility was established in very close proximity to the Derelict itself.
The moon itself was also revisited in Aliens: Infestation, but we would spend our time in a Union of Progressive People’s colony that had been established on the surface, as well as a brief trip to the crashed Derelict to take on the Space Jockey-born Xenomorph that had been hiding in the depths of the crashed extra-terrestrial vessel.
Would you like to return to Hadley’s Hope to revisit the infestation, or is it time to depict the fall of a completely new and original colony? Or have I missed a piece of media relevant to the Jorden’s activities in the Derelict? Sound off in the comment section below!